Yes, China’s political leadership under Xi has centralized policy initiative. And yes, in doing so it has narrowed the room for bottom-up innovations. But that does not automatically mean the end of adaptive local policy implementation.
Discussions about recent changes in central-local relations in China tend to focus on the top political leadership and, in particular, the persona of Xi Jinping. But from the perspective of local cadres, the degree, or consequences, of centralization may appear a little different.
Local Chinese Communist Party and government officials have always been part of a complex power structure and they are subject to a rigid cadre management system. Local governments have never been fully autonomous. At the same time, local cadres enjoy an enormous degree of discretion. This allows them to divert or sabotage policies, engage in corruption, and other predatory behavior. But the same discretion is also the backbone of China’s remarkably adaptive political regime and the foundation of effective policy implementation.
We are now observing that the (re-)centralization efforts initiated under Xi Jinping seriously curtail local governments’ political autonomy and cadres’ level of innovative activity. But it may be a bit premature to assume that this also heralds the end of China’s overall adaptive governance regime, which rests on a foundation of continuous and complex reforms over the past three decades.
Even China’s long-standing “experimentation” practice has always happened within certain limits, or as Sebastian Heilmann has put it, “under hierarchy.” This grassroots trial-without-reporting-the-error mode most often answers to macro political programs and tunes in with major policy initiatives and slogans of the day. And while policy adaptation by local governments is intended and pervasive in Chinese politics, outright “innovative” behavior is molded by the overall political climate and it has been encouraged to various degrees by different C.C.P. leaders. When “innovation” or “being innovative” (chuangxin) is stressed in Party speak and political programs, of course, local leaders go to great lengths to embrace it, as it helps them make a name for themselves. This happened to an extreme degree under the leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, when it produced both positive and negative consequences: expanded local deliberative governance models alongside wasteful image-building projects, for instance.
Now, one main goal of the Xi administration’s centralization efforts is to redirect implementation activity toward those measures and programs it wants to see executed, emphasizing “coordination and harmonization” (xietiao tongyi). In this political climate, any diversion from these core policies is understood as a distraction or even deviation. As being overly creative—or rather, talking about it—does not help further one’s career anymore, local leaders have little incentive to show off to trumpet their innovations. This could be one explanation for the decrease in the number of reported “real” innovations, including, in particular, the more unconventional ones that made localities eligible for the C.C.P.’s Central Compilation and Translation Office’s “local governance innovation award.” It’s not that experimentation and pilot projects have been abandoned as policy tools, but rather are employed in a more rule-based and controlled manner. Local governments’ ideas for experiments and innovations need to be approved by superior levels before they can actually be launched under close monitoring. These approval-seeking proposals have to be even more aligned with specific policies and increasingly need to take into account later emulation elsewhere.
But, after all, much more common and crucial is the everyday smaller scale adjustment of policies to local conditions. As programs and guidelines issued at central and provincial levels are often quite abstract and deliberately vague, they need to be concretized when they travel down the governmental hierarchy. And this has not fundamentally changed yet. It remains as a kind of adaptation without innovation. Beijing’s streamlining efforts in this regard are much more difficult to grasp: for instance, a reform of the intergovernmental transfer system and the expansion of the list of items for local administrative approval gives local governments even more discretion in deciding on budgets and measures, while the emphasis on judicial reforms and a “rule-based” administration further constrains their agency. In addition, oversight is increasing, and the sweeping anti-corruption and disciplinary campaign causes anxiety among local cadres, while they have to spend an increasing amount of their time in ideological training sessions.
Exactly how this all affects adaptive governance in China has to be scrutinized by empirical analysis of policy implementation where it actually happens and of local governments’ agency under changing circumstances.
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